Over 250 community developers attended our international conference this year. It was a joint conference held with the U.S. Community Development Society, building upon our renewed Partnership Agreement signed at the conference in Kentucky last year. Partnering with CDS was tremendous and we thank all of the CDS team for their huge energy and support this past year and at the event. In particular our thanks go to Chris Marko, Conference Planning Chair and incoming CDS President, Gisele Hamm, CDS President, Brent Hales, Neil Linscheid and Jane Leonard from our local hosts in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a great joy working with such professionals.
We had participants representing more than 20 countries, and over 30 states in the United States. We are pleased with the many comments received regarding the quality, uniqueness, and organization of the conference. We again thank our sponsors including the Blandin Foundation, University of Minnesota Extension, Western Illinois University, Purdue University, and the Scottish Government for their support.
Our keynote speakers were Kathleen Annette, Blandin Foundation, Anita Paul, Pan Himalayan Grass Roots Development Program; Mark Ritchie, Secretary of State of Minnesota, Annette Dixon, Vice President of the World Bank and Richard Todd from the Federal Reserve Bank. Special thanks to every person involved with the Local Host Committee in Minnesota for welcoming us all and organizing the on-the-ground logistics, mobile learning workshops where conference participants visited community development projects on the ground, the social event in St. Paul with Native American drumming and the Theater of Public Policy.
We had over 100 workshop presenters speaking on topics ranging from community well-being, place based development, local initiatives, environment, health, social justice and democracy, addressing poverty, refugees and immigration, agriculture and food systems, arts and, community capitals, leadership, youth and entrepreneurship, education, community impact, research and data, and community economic development programs. The focus of the conference was the role community development can play in supporting more sustainable communities, with a strong emphasis upon the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
World Bank Vice President, Annette Dixon, speaking at the conference
More photos of the conference are to be found on the IACD website www.iacdglobal.org and our Facebook site https://www.facebook.com/IACDglobal/
The 2016 conference presentations will be a wonderful resource and we plan to make these available on the IACD website. We will also publish many of the presentations, and produce a short film of the CD and SDG plenary session. We are very keen to encourage any presenter at the Minnesota conference to write up their presentation as an article for the next issue of IACD’s magazine Practice Insights magazine. This will be published in November. Articles should be no more than 1000 words and include some images that highlight your work. If IACD members are interested in your work reaching a wider (5000+) audience of community developers around the world, then please send Charlie McConnell your article for consideration. IACD’s magazine is intended for the busy practitioner, so we encourage a non-academic style. Please send your proposed article before the end of September to: charliesmcconnell@gmail.com
We also encourage you to submit such an article for possible publication in the CDS Journal of Community Development–please contact John Green, jjgreen@olemiss.edu, CDS Vanguard–please contact Cindy Banyai, Cindy.banyai@gmail.com and CDS Practice–please contact Craig Talmage, Craig.talmage@gmail.com.
If you are interested in writing a more academic/research type article, IACD is in discussions with its partner journal, the International Community Development Journal, published by Oxford University Press, and is looking for submissions again related to community development work around the SDG challenge. These articles are usually around 7000 words. At this stage we are inviting indications of interest only, by sending us a 200 word summary for consideration by the editors. Please send your abstract before the end of September to IACD’s Publications Chair KK Fung kkfung@hkbu.edu.hk
